Thursday, 29 November 2012

Videophony is one of Wallace’s predictions that really has come to
pass, even if some of the incidental details are different. Of course, it
didn’t require an enormous imaginative leap on DFW’s part, as one-to-one
audio-visual communication has been a science-fiction trope going way back; see
Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm (1932), for example.

So I’ve known about it for far longer than it’s existed in
practical form; and yet I’ve never particularly liked the idea. Now I have
Skype, but I have no particular wish to inflict my horrible face upon the
person to whom I’m talking and to be honest I can take it or leave it whether I
can see them or not. And Wallace’s farcical description of “video-physiognomic
dysphoria”, and the “optimistically misrepresentational masking” and “transmittable
tableaux” used to combat it, sums up all my reasons for resistance. (Although to
be honest, I’ve never much liked audio phone conversations either; or, for the
most part, face-to-face contact. The first time I sent an e-mail, in about
1993, I experienced a dizzy little rush, similar to when I first heard a song
by The Smiths; it just felt right, somehow.)

Of course, Wallace’s satire is not directed at the
technology per se. It’s about the many madnesses of consumer capitalism;
punters are encouraged to make incremental spends on innovations that
supposedly cure one problem (that you never knew you had) only to throw up a
new problem (that you never had before but, hey, here’s someone with a cure
that you can buy). And they all become agoraphobic but that doesn’t matter;
capitalism can find you, wherever you are.

…and the clearest manifestation of such capitalism at the
Enfield Tennis Academy is Michael Pemulis with his “warm pale innocent childish
urine”, sold from a battered hotdog tray. But Wallace is rather less cutting about this example of entrepreneurial spirit; it’s more of a hook upon which to hang various members of the ETA community and the respective roles they play in the big, dysfunctional family structure:

...Mario will be the only one of the Incandenza children not wildly successful as a professional athlete. No one who knows Mario could imagine that this fact will ever occur to him.

I do like Wallace’s treatment of Mario, refusing to let us feel any pity for him. Ennet House also gets another mention, as a source of cheap labour for Michael’s endeavours, helping to facilitate the very “self-abuse” that got them into trouble in the first place. Also, note the ONAN heraldic design:

...a snarling full-front eagle
with a broom and can of disinfectant in one claw and a Maple Leaf in the other
and wearing a sombrero and appearing to have about half-eaten a swatch of
star-studded cloth...

The various components of North America are all present and correct, but why the cleaning materials? Wasn’t there a waste truck involved somewhere during the Mario/Millicent encounter? Clean? Getting clean (Ennet; Michael’s clean urine)?

Oh, incidentally, do check out the ever-droll Expat@Large on fat and/or difficult books in general, including Infinite Jest.

Tuesday, 27 November 2012

"She
was there for hours," he says. "She would read for about 15 seconds and
then stop and tweet something, and then read. Was she tweeting deep
observations in the handful of pages she got through in the number of
hours she was reading it?"She got
through two pages and tweeted 10 times. There was underlining involved.
The Decemberists were playing over the loudspeakers.

"She
was there for hours," he says. "She would read for about 15 seconds and
then stop and tweet something, and then read. Was she tweeting deep
observations in the handful of pages she got through in the number of
hours she was reading it?"She got
through two pages and tweeted 10 times. There was underlining involved.
The Decemberists were playing over the loudspeakers.

"She
was there for hours," he says. "She would read for about 15 seconds and
then stop and tweet something, and then read. Was she tweeting deep
observations in the handful of pages she got through in the number of
hours she was reading it?"She got
through two pages and tweeted 10 times. There was underlining involved.
The Decemberists were playing over the loudspeakers.

"She
was there for hours," he says. "She would read for about 15 seconds and
then stop and tweet something, and then read. Was she tweeting deep
observations in the handful of pages she got through in the number of
hours she was reading it?"She got
through two pages and tweeted 10 times. There was underlining involved.
The Decemberists were playing over the loudspeakers.

She was there for hours... She would read for about 15 seconds and then stop and tweet something, and then read. Was she tweeting deep observations in the handful of pages she got through in the number of hours she was reading it? She got through two pages and tweeted 10 times. There was underlining involved. The Decemberists were playing over the loudspeakers...

"She
was there for hours," he says. "She would read for about 15 seconds and
then stop and tweet something, and then read. Was she tweeting deep
observations in the handful of pages she got through in the number of
hours she was reading it?"She got
through two pages and tweeted 10 times. There was underlining involved.
The Decemberists were playing over the loudspeakers.

"She
was there for hours," he says. "She would read for about 15 seconds and
then stop and tweet something, and then read. Was she tweeting deep
observations in the handful of pages she got through in the number of
hours she was reading it?"She got
through two pages and tweeted 10 times. There was underlining involved.
The Decemberists were playing over the loudspeakers.

Sunday, 25 November 2012

Bad writing – writing that’s deliberately bad – is a hard
trick to pull off convincingly. At its best it can be the literary equivalent
of Les Dawson’s piano playing; but context is all and often the reader can be
left confused. Is this a good writer doing bad writing or is it just bad
writing? To pick another example from a different discipline, is it something
akin to the acting of Hannah Lederer-Alton in the hugely underrated postmodern TV
soap Echo Beach?

Well, because DFW has written well elsewhere, we have to
assume that the following examples of bad writing are Les, not Hannah. The
first is Hal’s, and it can be excused by the fact that he wrote it when he was
12 or 13. In fact, its main flaw is that the writer’s ambition oversteps his
abilities, packed with words (“defendress”; “Irishized”) that sound as if they
ought to be real but aren’t; and notions (“‘post-post’-modern culture”;
“retrograde amines”) that probably need a tad more explication than Hal gives.
But hey, what’s wrong with a little “rhetorical flourish” anyway? B/B+ sounds
about right. The capitalised introduction does help to put things into
alt-historical context; this is the Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken; there is
no more broadcast television; and Himself died when Hal was in sixth grade.
Also, we may infer that in this parallel history, Hawaii 5-0 and Hill Street
Blues were as popular and successful as they were in our world. Wallace
wouldn’t dare mess with that reality, would he?

Incidentally, when you type “Steve McGarrett” into Google
Images, you’re on the fourth row before you even get to a picture of Jack Lord.
This is just wrong. Reboots be damned.

The second example will provoke an involuntary constriction in
the guts of anybody who has worked as an editor. This is the work of an adult
who, like Hal, had delusions of literary ability at the age of 12; but she
(since this is Helen, not James) never managed to shake them off and nobody had
the heart to disabuse her of them. The world of self-publishing is full of
these delusions and, yes, so is blogging. And today, since conventional news
print media is running on empty and can’t afford to pay for decent writers or
editors, it’s entirely feasible that drivel such as Helen Steeply’s could make
it into a Boston newspaper. It’s all there: the repetitions; the split
infinitives; the misuse of “tragic” and “ironic”; the glum reality that many
readers would fail to see how bad it is.

And then there’s the list of variously separatist organisations, some of which (BQ, FLQ, PQ) are almost real, even if Wallace gets Québec’s gender wrong and misses an acute accent from “Québécois”. His system of initials for determining the categories into which each organisation falls (“VV=Extremely Violent”, etc) feels familiar but I can’t recall where I’ve seen it; and then it comes to me. It was used in The Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors (2000) for their entry on Kurt Vonnegut; which was written by Dave Eggers; who wrote the foreword to Infinite Jest.

Which may mean something. But before we go down that route, or get onto videophony, may I draw your attention to The Method Reader blog, which is leading up to a visit to the DFW archives on December 14. Could be intriguing...

Friday, 23 November 2012

Sorry, that was a longer hiatus than I’d expected. Although I could just cover my tracks by following DFW’s example and throwing everything out of chronological order. But that would be confusing.

OK, Hal again, presumably back at ETA, and his brother Orin calls to accuse him of self-abuse. Which of course is a pretty accurate accusation, if not in the way he means it. And then:

Hal estimated over 60% of what he told Orin on the phone since Orin had abruptly started calling again this spring was a lie. He had no idea why he liked lying to Orin on the phone so much.

If he’s lying 60% of the time to his brother, how much of the rest of what he says is a lie? And if we make the lazy but possibly justifiable assumption that Hal is some sort of stand-in for the author, how much is he lying? Of course, he’s writing fiction, so it’s all a lie; but fiction writers can still wrongfoot their readers, break the rules, lay false trails. And Wallace has already laid so many trails, at least some of them are going to be false, surely?

Orin’s “Phoenician felled by the heat” sounds like a quotation from something, but I’m not sure what. There’s a Phoenician in The Waste Land, but he drowns. Any ideas, anyone? The image does make me think of this:

And his remark about missing New Orleans reminds me that the first time I heard the song ‘Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans’ I seriously thought it was about a beauty queen. But who is his “special somebody”? And does his question about separatism mean that we’re any closer to finding out how all these pieces, these trails, fit together?

Ennet House. I’m guessing at least some of the characters we’ve encountered so far are going to end up here, but not sure which ones. Hal, certainly; is this where he meets the Cuban orderly? Erdedy? Maybe Kate Gompert? Apart from that, this seems to be little more than a set-up for a good joke; “...known in Boston AA simply as the Guy Who Didn’t Even Use His First Name”. Well, I laughed.

I also laughed at the story about the bricklayer. More specifically, I laughed when I first heard a recording of Gerard Hoffnung telling it; and I’m sure Laurel and Hardy did a similar routine and I’ll bet you they weren’t the first. Which doesn’t mean that DFW shouldn’t tell it again, but I’m not entirely sure why he does.

OK, let’s break it there. McGarrett & Furillo next. And it won’t be the best part of a month, I promise.

Saturday, 3 November 2012

I’m a little uneasy about the description of the tryst between Mario and Millicent, to be honest. It’s funny and sweet, but there’s something a tiny bit exploitative about it as well; she’s enormous and he’s labouring under an unspecified array of deformities, held together with an “extendable police lock” and, well, that’s it, really.

But is this really about them, or about us watching them? When they discover the camera in the thicket, they know that they’ve been under surveillance but they don’t know that we’ve been watching as well. Simply for being readers, we’re implicated as voyeurs. And Millicent’s father was doing fine prancing around in his daughters’ leotards until he knew he was being watched. Think back to the last section in ETA, where the students were all watching their cartridges and the screen was described as a window; they were watching, but were they also being watched?

Back to Marathe and Steeply, and back to Wallace’s habit of dropping reality bombs into his fiction. There really was a group called the FLQ, which actually stood for the Front de libération du Québec (not sure if DFW is really getting his genders wrong). They were involved in a number of terrorist attacks in the 1960s and early 70s, and one of their leaders wrote a book with the provocative title White Niggers of America. I’m just wondering whether this has any bearing on the time Steeply spent pretending to be a “negroid” Haitian. Or could he be... no, hold that thought.

The notes give more background to various political upheavals, which have left Quebec in a state of pretended independence from the North American behemoth. Marathe’s wife is dying and the footnotes implicate the toxic events that have occurred since Interdependence. Some of Marathe’s comrades believe him to be eidetic; which may offer some sort of link with Hal Incandenza; but in any case, Marathe knows it not to be true.

And I just don’t get that lost fragment about walled and murated nations. I mean, “murated”, I’m guessing, derives from the Latin “murus”; but if you Google the word, the first hit you get is a reference to, um, Infinite Jest.

The Spandex-clad guru comes as something of a relief. Is it Millicent’s father? Unlikely, since she came to ETA partly to escape from him. But I like the idea of literally living off the sweat of others; so is he just a metaphor for the ETA management, thriving from the exertions of their charges?

Am I over-thinking this?

And then we’re back amidst Wallace’s attempts to invoke the demotic. Is this Clenette again? If so, she’s certainly become a bit more assertive. And I’m wondering whether Steeply is somehow involved, in his previous persona. Or am I being racist to assume that just because Steeply was pretending to be a Haitian, that he’d get involved in criminal acts? OK, is that more or less racist than pretending to be a Haitian in the first place?

Hey, is that the end of the chapter? I knew we’d get there eventually.

Thursday, 1 November 2012

We discover how the tennis prodigies cope with the effects of their high-pressure environment and, as we might have guessed, it’s with those wonderful cartridges. The viewing rooms are windowless, but the screen looks like a window, a trompe l’oeil, a false vision of a world outside. But – just wondering here – can someone else see in through this window?

And the cartridge they’re watching is of a tennis player. Now, I vaguely remember Stan Smith; or maybe it’s the trainers named after him that I remember. (If you Google the name, you get far more images of the shoes than you do of the balding tennis player.) As with Bouchard and Charest, I wonder whether I’m supposed to know whether he was real; and whether some of the other characters that I’ve assumed to be fictional, actually have some kind of historical basis. Is there really, for example, a Kent Blott? (His dad is an ENT oncologist; did he perhaps treat the snot-filled DuPlessis, or maybe meet the Saudi attaché at a conference? All that gunk; see also Schacht’s demonstration of how to floss.)

Although the Smith footage is meant to be educational, it’s also hypnotic; “Don’t Think Just See Don’t Know Just Flow”. They’re watching the seam, calculating the spin, but what’s really important is the near-catatonic mindset that the cartridge provokes. Did Hal’s dad direct the film? Do all his works have this strange effect? As Troeltsch says:

It’s hearing the same motivational stuff over and over till sheer repetitive weight makes it sink down into the gut... Just do it. Forget about is there a point, of course there’s no point. The point of repetition is there is no point. Wait until it soaks into the hardware and then see the way this frees up your head. A whole shitload of head-space you don’t need for the mechanics anymore, after they’ve sunk in. Now the mechanics are wired in. Hardwired in. This frees the head in the remarkablest ways.

Over and over, looping and looping, like the cartridge in front of the attaché’s recliner. And then, bathos: what to do if you feel a fart coming on.

OK, Mario next.

PS: By a long margin, this is the page that has attracted the most views. And the majority of search terms that end up here are about Stan Smith.

About Me

Author of books about Radiohead, Leonard Cohen and The Noughties, plus various odds and sods for The Guardian, Mojo, Time Out, Prospect, BBC, CNN and more. Finally doing an MA. You can reach me at timfootman (AT) gmail.com or follow me on Twitter or Instagram.